At the Getty Museum in Los Angeles

It's thirteen years since we visited the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (back at Christmas, 1997) but I still consider it one of the most impressive museums I have visited. Everything about the Getty seems perfect, at least to the visitor who is made to feel most welcome. What a wonderful experience, to visit a Roman villa, fully restored and containing a wonderful collection of Roman and other art.

Christmas Morning in Harlem, NYC, 2008

Christmas Morning on Morningside Drive, 2008

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (2)

Stairs at the Art Gallery of Ontario, summer 2009 (1)

St. James Anglican Church, Quebec

St. James Anglican Church, built in the early 1800s, is located in St. Jean sur Richelieu, Quebec (near Lacolle, which is a border crossing from Quebec's Eastern Townships to New York State). When the church was constructed there was a large English-speaking population in the Eastern Townships (including members of my paternal grandmother's family who attended the church over 125 years ago), but for various reasons the English-speaking population has dwindled over the last fifty or sixty years. For more information, visit: http://www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com/.

St. Cunegonde Church in fall, rue Notre Dame, Montreal

Notre Dame de Bonsecours in Old Montreal

My maternal grandmother

Here is a photograph of my maternal grandmother, taken (I believe) at Westmount Park, around 1922. Her maiden name was Chew, and she was married to my grandfather, John R. Parker. My mother is on our right and my Uncle John, her only living sibling, on the left. An older child, Willie, died before my mother was born; a doctor was called when he was ill but by the time the doctor arrived, intoxicated, the child had died.

St Anthony of Padua Church

Located on St. Antoine Street in Montreal, near where our family used to live, the old St. Anthony Church was demolished for the building of the Ville Marie Expressway. The new St. Anthony's is a much more humble building.

From the old St. Anthony's Church, seen through the window on the far right of the church doors.

This is the Ville Marie Expressway directly across the street from St. Anthony's Church, where the old church was located.

Photo from 1963 before the Ville Marie Expressway was built

Turret Cigarettes

Here is the same Turret Cigarette advertisement as in the previous post, except that now debris has been cleared away from in front of it. This advertisement was protected, in pristine condition, because it was between two adjacent walls for many years. Since this photograph was taken someone has painted graffiti over it.

Smoke Turret Cigarettes!

A painted billboard, recently exposed when the neighbouring building was demolished after a fire, for Turret cigarettes. Located next door to Artie Gold's old apartment building, The Westmore.

A walk in N.D.G., Summer 2008

A walk in our neighbourhood, Notre Dame de Grace, is always interesting and fun. Here, beside the apartment where Artie Gold used to live, is a painted billboard from the 1920s-1930s, pristine and clear after being protected and hidden for many decades by another building that was destroyed by fire a few years ago. The debris has now been removed from where the old building used to stand. I see others have posted photographs online of this same painted billboard. 

Montreal isn't Ville Marie--the City of Mary--for nothing. Here, a few blocks east of the Turret cigarette advertisement, is a statue of Mary (to the left of the huge statue of Jesus), in someone's back yard. 

A few hundred feet east from the statues of Jesus and Mary, on Monkland Avenue, is the former home of poet Irving Layton; it has been renovated by the new owners. I remember visiting Layton here, with CZ and Noni Howard, in his living room. Sometimes, when I would walk or drive by Layton's place, I'd look at his home and see him sitting at his dining room table writing poems, smoking his pipe.

On the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, near where Irving Layton used to live, is this statue of Mary, with a water fall and water circulating around the statue.

Next, we walk down Elmhurst Avenue from Sherbrooke, cross the railway tracks, and then walk along St. Jacques by the old Griffith-McConnell nursing home; the building has fallen in disrepair and neglect since they moved to their new location in Cote St. Luc. The old place is still standing, but since these photographs were taken, in 2008, construction has begun behind the building and I suspect it will be demolished.

Poetry, spirituality, lilacs blooming in spring, lanes that are like the country, history and people, they all make N.D.G. one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Montreal.




On the way home we stop by Rosedale-Queen Mary Road United Church, at Terrebonne and Rosedale, where they have constructed a labyrinth outside of the adjoining community centre. I gave a reading here once, all very nice people. The labyrinth is open to the public and has an amazing affect when walking on it. You are almost immediately plunged into profound questioning on the meaning of mortality. I never expected this but it certainly had this affect on me. As you walk the labyrinth, you are removed from the everyday, you find yourself in the spiritual.

There is a lot more to see than this on our walk in N.D.G.; this is just a part of the less trendy western part of N.D.G. For instance, there is a miniature Chinese garden directly across the street from the labyrinth; this is a wonderful creation someone has lovingly made and maintained in their front garden, it is a city and landscape all in miniature, with Oriental statues, running water in a little river, and tiny houses.

Morningside Park, spring 2009